GAME OF THRONES premiere

To my great surprise, I was able to find episode one ("Winter is Coming") of Game of Thrones online last night only a few hours after the premiere time--kudos to whoever did that. No obnoxious and virus-y surveys attached, either. For those of you using the internet, you should be able to find it on any of the usual sites; if you need a recommendation for a site to watch, let me know in the comments and I will find a way to send you the info. I will not list sites here, as I would like to keep specific sites on the down-low.

A word on watching TV online: yes, it is illegal, even if you just watch it streaming and don't download (which is rife with virus problems in any case). It is not my preferred method of watching. If I had a TV, I would be willing to subscribe to HBO for the duration of the run of Game of Thrones in order to watch it legally. I do not have a TV, however, and HBO as yet does not have a way to watch its TV shows online legally/in a sanctioned manner. I found copies of the first episode, only a few hours after the premiere, in no fewer than 5 different places online. I would be willing to bet that in the next few days and weeks, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, most of them my age or similar, will watch Game of Thrones online in such a manner. Watching TV or even feature films on compilation websites is an exceedingly common thing for college students and young professionals, just as listening to music uploaded to YouTube is very common, whether it is sanctioned by record companies or not. The most interesting thing of all is that my watching and listening to media for free, online, does not actually preclude my buying said programming later. If I really enjoy Game of Thrones, I will probably buy the DVDs. Similarly, I have bought several albums on iTunes after listening to different tracks, and really getting to know them, on YouTube. The trend nowadays is simply to only buy things you already know you like--by getting to know them first for free, online.

Now onto my impressions of the premiere. The rest of this post is spoilers--if you do not want to know the plot of either the book or the TV series, do not read any further.

This episode covers the events from, roughly, the prologue to "The things I do for love." I quite liked it, overall. Production value really is gorgeous, and the cast is very talented. There are many added or modified scenes as compared to the book, but I fully understand that television is a different medium from books and that changes in this way are often necessary. Very few of these changes bothered me--the only one that does with any regularity is the change of Cat from book to screen, which seems in many ways more of a whimsical character change than some of the other changes. In the book, Ned is the one who does not want to become Hand, guessing (correctly) that it is a dirty job with no thanks and believing (correctly) that he belongs in the wild north, not playing court games. Cat pushes him to accept, wanting (as always) to raise the position of her family in the eyes of the kingdom and to do her duty; her birth house's motto is "Family, Duty, Honor," and Cat fits that, in many ways, to a tee. It's only after Bran "falls" (read: is hurled from a window after discovering the twincest) that she suddenly understands the danger that the Lannisters pose and tries to convince Ned to stay. In the TV series Cat is, from the first five minutes, dead-set against Bran witnessing the execution and ferociously against Ned traveling south to become Hand.

Most other things were fine. I disliked Peter Dinklage's accent as Tyrion; he's American, and it shows. Just when you get used to it, it comes jarring back, straining the suspension of disbelief a bit. Otherwise, however, Dinklage makes a wonderfully Impish Tyrion, and from what I've read, he only gets better as Tyrion's role expands in later episodes. I do wonder how well newbies can keep up with characters and whatnot; it's quite a lot, in many instances, and I feel like some relationships are not quite fully explained in any sense, or are a bit clumsily explained by Arya in the king-meeting-Starks scene, which does not feel quite natural. These are all relatively small nit-picks, however, and now that some of the messy exposition has gotten out of the way, I will be interested in seeing how the series progresses in relation to the book and if it can remain as gripping and intense as the book is.